Venus in the daytime

I received a tip off that Venus was visible in broad daylight today. THANK YOU! It is just possible to see the crescent Moon in the picture above. It's somewhere in the middle. Venus appears as maybe one pixel in extreme enlargement. In real life, by squinting, I was able to make out a bright dot in the sky about 3 finger widths at 10 o'clock (ie north-east on a map page). Not easy to pick out until you know where to look. To the naked eye it might seem like a really high aeroplane. As you can see, it didn't photograph well with the better camera so I got out my wildlife telescope and the cheap camera. It turns out that Venus is showing us a phase quite similar to that of the Moon.

Venus's orbit is inside ours so it is possible to see both its lit up and shadow sides. I think Galileo was the first person to notice this.Galileo used this observation to show that Copernicus's model that had the Sun at the centre of the Solar System was correct. There would be no other way of explaining the phases. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/gal-challenge/gquiz6c.html